As an extension of Arc’s Canada-Australia joint issue with Australia’s Cordite magazine, over the next several weeks, Arc will be publishing online selected pieces from Australian poets — this is in addition to the Australian poetry published in print in Arc 77. For the Arc-Cordite joint issue, each magazine handed the editorial responsibilities over to the other: so that Cordite filled Arc #77 (and these these webpages) with nothing but Australian poetry, prose and artwork; Arc did the same for Cordite (Arc’s part of this partnership will be published online at Cordite in December 2014). Our intent in this partnership is to showcase and cross-pollinate poetics between Australia and Canada and to share with a broader audience poetry that may be little known outside of home borders.
Falling for Glenn Gould
The microphone is in the way.
There is the arrested breath. The panic. The rush
out the door into the world of air and light.
Your body lingers behind
as you stumble into silence.
And from this silence you will remember
unremembering syntax, grammar, pronouns.
I falls off as I fall for you who falls backwards.
Awareness turns.
Awareness returns.
It returns towards a centre
where listening becomes
a touching
of the inwardness of form.
Every part, organ, fibre, grain, tightly articulated
to being—the ill-tempered, well-tempered, clavier.
Dominique Hecq is a Belgian-born writer now living in Australia. Her latest book of poetry, Out of Bounds, was published by Re.press in 2009. Stretchmarks of Sun is forthcoming. She is Associate Professor at Swinburne University.